The Museum of Unnatural Histories
Whiting Award 2025 Winner in Poetry
This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena’ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena’ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this “distance between the learning and the telling,” Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu’a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu’a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker’s story to be heard.
Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to “decide/who you must become.”
Annie Wenstrup
Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories and a 2025 Whiting Award recipient. She held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Author portrait © TJ Turner